A blog about random stuff, but mostly programming.
I m sure many people have noticed this already: Gambling with investor money (very fashionable), loot boxes and other gambling mechanics in games, dark patterns in UIs like endless scrolling, likes in social media, prediction markets, what will the next output of some LLM do, the list goes on and on. There sure are a lot of ways to get your dopamine fix. For me it s most obvious in games. Call it…
I wrote another function plotter where you can write your function in simple JavaScript code. Something like func ( "f" , x => sin (x)) . No new special math-like syntax you have to learn, just JavaScript. Features: Plot updates each time you change the code Multiple plots Non-function objects like points, lines, rects and circles. Draggable objects (set draggable: true then shift+click to drag)…
I ve been talking to students about this for a few years now. But I ve never heard anyone else talk about it, so it might be worth writing about it here. Or not. You ll be the judge of that. 😉 When programmers need a library (framework, programming language, tool, …) they often just grab a popular one. GitHub stars, NPM downloads, Stack Overflow posts or frameworks "everyone uses". After all, if…
For a few years now I ve been toying with the idea of redoing my website. And I m moving home at the moment and I needed something to stay sane (at least somewhat). So a new website it is. 😄 Anyway, it s been ~7 years since the last time I touched this website (apart from writing content). And over the years I collected a small list of ideas I wanted to play around with. But before starting with…
A few years ago I read somewhere that you can probably run a Reddit-sized forum on a Raspberry Pi. It was a Reddit comment and I had my doubts about that. But a few weeks ago I watched What if you tried to print Wikipedia? and it mentions that the English Wikipedia receives about 100 edits per minute (1.7 edits/sec). For some reason that really surprised me (I expected way more) and brought me…
Now that title is a hand full. In the last post I looked at rendering UI rectangles with OpenGL 4.5. The next step on that journey is text rendering, more specifically subpixel font rendering . So instead of rather boring rectangles we re now also throwing individual characters ("glyphs") at the screen. Way more interesting. 🙂 I wanted to look into subpixel font rendering for quite a while now,…
Well, it happened again. I was just writing a UI system in C (different story) and thought about the performance of different ways to render rectangles. Most people would just look around a bit and choose a suitably impressive or "modern" approach and be done with it. Some would even research the topic for a bit and then choose the appropriate approach for their environment. Well, I did a bit of…